A research project by Matthew Sangster exploring life and culture in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using Richard Horwood's PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE (1792-99)

Mapping Emotions in Victorian London is a Stanford Literary Lab project supported by the Mellon Foundation and hosted on Historypin. In the words of its ‘About’ page: ‘The project has invited anonymous participants to annotate whether passages drawn from novels, published mainly in the Victorian era, represented London places in a fearful, happy, or unemotional manner. This data from the crowd allowed us to generate the maps you find here, revealing a previously unseen emotional geography of Victorian London.’ Unlike many crowdsourced projects, this one used a payment model, hiring labour from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This has a really nice map overlay, built using Ordinance Survey maps from the National Library of Scotland, and some interesting masks for examining different aspects of the city. At the moment, though, it seems quite difficult to get an kind of overall sense of what texts are used on the site, how these were selected and what the rationale for including or excluding things was. Hopefully the nature of the emotional geography the project examines will become clearer when the team publish more of their findings.